James A. Frost

This is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to indicate that I am looking for a job.

Work History

Ab Initio Software, Lexington, Massachusetts
Engineer, March 2004 - Present

Created and integrated shared communication infrastructure between a Windows-based application and a data processing back-end.

Art Technology Group, Boston, Massachusetts.
Engineer, August 1997 - March 2004.

Wrote HTML filtering and deterministic load-balancing plug-ins for NetScape^? Enterprise Server, Microsoft Internet Information Server, and Apache running on Windows NT and Solaris platforms.

Technical lead for ongoing work on The Station.

Responsible for construction of an automatic BeanInfo^? code generator which utilized the JDK 1.2 Doclet interface to read source-code tags and generate bean information objects.

Technical lead for the programmer's workbench, a GUI interface for managing the Dynamo application framework.

Jim Frost Consulting, Natick, Massachusetts.
Consultant, April 1997 - July 1997.

Worked on various projects including a type inferencing system for reverse-engineering Java code (both source an compiled) and a GUI-based Java debugger with extensive static and dynamic inspection capabilities.

Sourcecraft, Inc., Burlington, Massachusetts.
Technical Staff, April 1996 - April 1997.

Originally responsible for many GUI-related components of NetCraft^?, a Java development environment written in Java. Created a Java-specific build tool that correctly handles dependency issues by parsing the Java source files for cross-references and analyzing the dependency graph to locate loops (codependencies) and subdependencies, even across multiple packages. Built a complete editor with programmable key bindings in Java. Created image management classes to support several image formats not handled by native libraries. Later worked on ObjectCraft^?, a web site construction product with dynamic page creation and database integration. Changed HTTP server to use a thread pool rather than dynamically created threads for increased performance and predictability. Created C++ (Win32/MFC) to Java integration classes to integrate C++ design side with Java HTTP server. Performed JDK 1.0.x to 1.1 conversion of entire Java source base. Wrote ACL-based security subsystem and associated GUI-based editors. Created workarounds for a large number of Sun JVM bugs.

Software Tool & Die, Brookline, Massachusetts.
Senior Technologist, September 1994 - March 1996.

Principal engineer in the design and construction of a World Wide Web browser originally targetting Windows NT and Windows 95 and intended to port easily to Windows 3.1, Macintosh, and OS/2. Project included the creation of a portable library layer to handle GUI and IPC tasks, including a portable thread library constructed on top of setjmp/longjmp. Responsible for many systems programming tasks involved with the maintenance and improvement of The World, a public Internet access system, including the design and construction of a general ledger system used to manage tens of thousands of accounts interactively and modification of many existing UNIX applications and services (e.g. telnetd, rlogind, zmodem) to improve performance or correct deficiencies.

CenterLine Software (formerly Saber Software), Cambridge, Massachusetts
Software Engineer, November 1989 - September 1994.

Originally involved in the design and development of GUI interface components under X11. Major contributor toward the porting of an integrated C/C++ development environment to AIX 3.X, DG/UX, HP/UX, and Solaris 2 and extending and maintaining the environment following each port. Particular areas of expertise included POSIX API programming and emulation, UNIX/POSIX signal emulation and handling, object file reading, writing, and linking on several systems, and substantial assembly-level work on the RS/6000 and HP 9000/700. Involved with nearly every other aspect of the product including editor, compiler, and operating system integration, multicast message server, GUI, C parser, and dynamic object code linker. Major contributor in the porting of an object code error-checking and coverage tool to Sun SPARC under Solaris 2. Principal engineer in porting the error-checking tool to HP PA-RISC under HP/UX 8.X. Major tasks involved writing object code and debugging information readers for the HP SOM object file format, automatic object-code dataflow analysis and inline object-code modification.

Software Tool & Die, Brookline, Massachusetts.
Software Engineer, May 1989 - November 1989.

Contract X Window applications programming under SunOS^? and System V and systems programming work for The World, a public access UNIX system and the very first public Internet access facility.

Associative Design Technology, Westboro, Massachusetts.
Software Engineer, June 1988 - April 1989.

Aided in the porting of an object-oriented CASE tool from the Silicon Graphics environment to the X Window System under SunOS^?. Specific tasks included the design and implementation of an extremely portable object-oriented graphics library which ran under both X Window and SGI GL, the creation of data management tools to increase application portability, and the creation of utilities to move existing application databases to new environments.

Dana S. Beane & Company, PC, Laconia, New Hampshire.
Systems Programmer/Analyst, October 1984 - June 1988.

Built and maintained a multiuser, multiprocessor MS-DOS system. Built an IBM System/34 OCL emulator for MS-DOS, as well as security and usage control software and utilities written in C and Pascal. Ported, maintained, and extended proprietary financial packages written in RPG. Analyzed various customer systems for improvement and replacement.

Publications

• "BSD Sockets: How you gonna call?", Sun Expert, July 1990, pp. 63-70. See BSD Sockets: A Quick And Dirty Primer.

• "A Few Good X11 Debugging Tips," The X Journal, March-April 1993, pp. 60-61.

• "Windows NT: Finally, A Grown-Up Operating System From Microsoft," Sun Expert, December 1995.

• Regular Java columnist for Sun Expert, December 1999 - May 2002.

Experience

Operating Systems

Extensive experience with:

• Most UNIX variants, both common and uncommon (e.g. SunOS^? 3.x/4.x, Solaris 2.x, HP/UX 7.x/8.x/9.x, AIX 3.x, DG/UX, SCO UNIX/Xenix, BSD 4.x, AT&T UNIX System V.2/V.3/V.4, IRIX 4.x/5.x, others).
• Windows NT.
• MS-DOS, including including several multiuser variations (e.g. NTNX, DR-DOS, VM386).

Moderate experience with:

• MINIX
• XINU
• VPS (Boston University IBM/370)
• System/32 and /34
• CP/M

Limited experience with:

• MVS

Application environments

Extensive experience with:

• Solaris 2.x threads
• Win32 threads
• IRIX 5.x sproc
• X11 Xlib
• POSIX API

Moderate experience with:

• SGI NeWS^?
• SGI GL

Language experience

Extensive experience with:

• Java (both applications and applets)
• C++
• K&R and ANSI C
• Several Pascal variants
• IBM/370 (Enterprise/9000) Assembler
• IBM POWER (RS/6000) Assembler
• HP PA-RISC Assembler
• Several BASIC variants
• RPG II

Moderate experience with:

• HTML
• FORTRAN-77
• Several LISP variants
• 6502 Assembler
• MIPS R3000 Assembler

Limited experience with:

• Modula-2
• Intel 8088 Assembler
• PDP-11 Assembler

Education

Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts. College of Liberal Arts Concentration: Computer Science

Concentration requirements included the design and implementation of an operating system kernel in IBM/370 assembler, an hierarchical filesystem under XINU, and TCP/IP networking libraries and applications.

Interests

Mountain biking, photography, skiing, volleyball, reading, image processing.
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